Editorial shorts: The element of joy

Have you ever been in a crowd of 400 people that suddenly went silent?

It happened a couple of times before the Dalai Lama entered a Mayo Clinic auditorium Wednesday: a sudden hush, as the perception spread that he was about to enter. Those first silences were false alarms, except that "alarms" is not the right word. When he did enter, the crowd rose to its feet, and stood in reverence as he made his way to the stage.

In his new book about the Dalai Lama, "The Open Road," the travel writer Pico Iyer suggests that the leader of Tibetan Buddhism is uncomfortable with romantic exaggerations of his own importance. In Tibetan, the term "lama" means "guru," or someone whose wisdom makes him worthy of respect, Iyer quotes the Dailai Lama as telling him. "No implication of 'Living Buddha!'"

To seat the Mayo crowd, he flapped his hands downward in a gesture as if to say, "Oh, go on, stop your flattery." The audience laughed, and sat.

At one point in the afternoon's conversation, the moderator described the stress felt by doctors and nurses who treat patients in severe pain. The Dalai Lama lifted his head at the words, and his face briefly assumed an expression of agony. And then he reminded the practitioners of the joy available to them through their work. "Whatever the pursuit," he said, "the element of joy is very important."

Not all the ways to improve the administration of American elections involve technology, new laws or big-buck spending. Significant improvement could come simply by putting more and better-trained election judges behind the registration tables at the polls.

That point was made Tuesday at the Humphrey Institute by one of the nation's leading thinkers and authors about election reform, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie shares Ornstein's view. It's why he's been touting the opportunity election judges have to serve democracy and get paid while doing it. His office is also working with high schools to recruit poll-worker trainees, the 16- and 17-year-old paid interns who are legally able to perform most of the duties of voting-age election judges.

One thing the Legislature and Gov. Tim Pawlenty could do to help is enact legislation championed by state Rep. Carol McFarlane, R-White Bear Lake, to make people who do not affiliate with major parties eligible to serve as election judges. The current requirement that judges declare a major-party affiliation wrongly bars minor-party people and true independents from performing a needed service.